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PUBLIC MARKS from pvergain with tag gui

July 2007

Dabo Application Framework for Python
Dabo is a 3-tier, cross-platform application development framework, written in Python atop the wxPython GUI toolkit. And while Dabo is designed to create database-centric apps, that is not a requirement. Lots of people are using Dabo for the GUI tools to create apps that have no need to connect to a database at all.
Desktop applications. That's what Dabo does. It's not YAWF (yet another web framework). There are plenty of excellent web frameworks out there, so if that's what you are looking for, Dabo isn't for you. But there are almost no desktop application frameworks out there, and if you want to create applications that run on Windows, OS X or Linux, Dabo is for you!
We have taken what we've learned from 25 combined years of database application development, and built an easy-to-use runtime framework that runs on all three major platforms. Dabo consists of 3 logical tiers (UI; business logic; database access) plus an umbrella application object.
More information can be found at http://dabodev.com/

March 2007

PyCon 2007 was held on February 23-25, 2007, in Addison, Texas. One of the sessions given there was a 45-minute talk entitled Developing Desktop Applications with Dabo, given by Ed Leafe, and filmed by Paul McNett.
The video of the session is available here; it has been broken into 6 segments, due to YouTube's limit of 10 minutes per video.

Flex is a way to develop Flash applications by programming. It includes a declarative XML language called MXML for laying out user interfaces, and a programming language called ActionScript, which is a superset of ECMAScript (that is, standardized JavaScript), with extra features like optional static type checking. ActionScript is a single language that works across all platforms, so you don’t have to worry about differences. Because it is based on ECMAScript, your JavaScript knowledge is not lost. All MXML components are actually written in ActionScript, which is what you use if you want to write your own components. Flex applications compile directly into SWFs (Flash binaries), which are then Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled by the Flash runtime, for extra speed.

January 2007

XForms makes development of Web-deployed applications faster and easier. XForms' clean architecture makes applications more robust, more scalable, faster, and more secure. Except for one little detail, developing with XForms would be a no-brainer. That detail is that no current browsers actually support XForms out of the box. Needless to say, this severely limits what you can do with XForms and where you can deploy them.
However, there are workarounds. Browser plug-ins exist for both Windows® Internet Explorer® and Firefox that add XForms support to these market-leading browsers. XForms processors have also been written in Flash that can be deployed to any browser with a Flash runtime. Finally, there are server-side solutions that precompile all XForms markup to classic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and JavaScript programs.
These solutions all have something to recommend them, but for first learning XForms the simplicity of support right in the browser really helps. You can write a piece of a form and then preview it. Then you can change it a little bit more and preview it again. If the form doesn't look quite right, tweak it a bit and reload. Server-side solutions like Chiba are good for deployment, but for learning nothing beats the rapid development cycle of a browser. Therefore, in this article I focus on using the Mozilla XForms plug-in in Firefox.